Chapter Text
Hephaestus is the god of blacksmithing.
When it comes to myths, he typically is one of the people in the background. You would probably not notice him a whole lot and even if you did you would probably only see the fact that he is not very good looking.
If you got to know him at all you would then find out that he is one of the nicest and gentlest gods there.
One of the only major myths that he is in happens to be his birth (like most gods).
Unlike most of the gods that we have talked about Hephaestus is surprisingly not a son of Zeus. Even more surprisingly, he does not even have a dad. Yes, you read that right. Hephaestus is the son of Hera and only Hera.
Hera got tired of Zeus having children with ladies that weren’t her, so she decided to give him payback.
Hera is the goddess of marriage so she was not able to cheat on her husband as that would go against her moral code apparently. She decided to magic herself pregnant and then was surprised when he came out ugly.
Hera was sad but immediately thought about how people would see her if she had an ugly child so instead, she threw him off of Olympus also known as the tallest mountain that they knew of at that time. Athena found Hephaestus and brought him to Hera.
“Hey Hera, look at this very ugly child that looks as if someone was able to get pregnant from magic.”
“Oh, I just threw my ugly child that I was able to conceive from magic off of the top of this mountain but I’m sure this is not the same baby even though they look the same as the other child”
Hera somehow didn’t recognize her child and ended up feeding him god-making milk thing (some places mention it being from her boob, but this book was meant for my mom, so no mentions of boobs were allowed). He had almost finished with his drink when she recognized him, and she took away his drink but he already had the god making milk so there was nothing that she could do. Hephaestus was officially a god.
Being a male god, he did try to make some moves on different goddesses however because of his ugliness none of the gods, female or not, wanted to be anywhere near him. Because of people wanting nothing to do with him, he typically hid in a blacksmithing area. Doing this, he was able to learn all about how the metal works and how to make the best weapons out of what you have access to.
Surprisingly despite his ugliness he was in fact able to get a couple ‘lovers’.
The first one was surprisingly Athena. Athena wasn’t really a ‘lover’ of him but somehow, they managed to make a baby? Hephaestus was begging Athena to at least give him a chance, but Athena kept saying no.
What did Hephaestus do about someone saying no to him you may ask? He did what most gods did and didn’t listen to the person saying no. He ended up hugging her around her legs to try and make her not walk away from him.
It didn’t work as she ended up just walking away from him however Hephaestus’s grease that was on him ended up getting on Athena’s dress. She ended up wiping it off with a handkerchief and then threw that handkerchief out of the window. This handkerchief ended up becoming a person somehow.
Another lover of Hephaestus happens to be his wife Aphrodite. The only reason that Aphrodite got married to him was because Zeus was slightly angry that she was going around and flirting with every single person she could see and taking away from the mortals that would flirt with him.
Zeus somehow decided that if she got married that she would stop flirting with the mortals. Zeus somehow didn’t remember the fact that he was married as well and being married didn't stop him from making babies with random mortals so why would it stop her from making moves with random mortals. He decided that she should marry the ugliest god there was. Enter Hephaestus.
Hephaestus was just happy that he was able to have a wife. He was very lonely up until this point and now he had a wife that would love him unconditionally, right? No, just no.
Aphrodite hated Hephaestus so much that she decided to just ignore her marriage with him and just get together with Ares the god of war. Hephaestus is aware of her cheating on him, but he just tries to ignore it for the most part (he doesn't really ignore it but apparently, I did ignore it).
“This is my wife Aphrodite, and this is her husband Ares. I don’t like him very much, but he makes her happy so therefore I am happy.”
